Google XML Sitemaps

Omschrijving

Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.

With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Supported since over 9 years and rated as the best WordPress plugin, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do – providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines. It will not break your site, slow it down or annoy you. Guaranteed!

If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it (on the right side of this page)! 🙂

Licentie

Good news, this plugin is free for everyone! Since it’s released under the GPL, you can use it free of charge on your personal or commercial site.

Vertalingen

The plugin comes with various translations, please refer to the WordPress Codex for more information about activating the translation. If you want to help to translate the plugin to your language, please have a look at the sitemap.pot file which contains all definitions and may be used with a gettext editor like Poedit (Windows).

Installatie

If you want: Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Settings -> XML-Sitemap and customize settings like priorities and change frequencies.

The plugin will automatically update your sitemap of you publish a post, so there is nothing more to do 🙂

FAQ

Where can I find the options page of the plugin?

It is under Settings > XML Sitemap. I know nowadays many plugins add top-level menu items, but in most of the cases it is just not necessary. I’ve seen WP installations which looked like an Internet Explorer ten years ago with 20 toolbars installed. 😉

Do I have to create a sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz by myself?

Not anymore. Since version 4, these files are dynamically generated. There must be no sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz in your site directory anymore! The plugin will try to rename them to sitemap.xml.bak if they still exists.

This version works with WordPress 3.3 and better. If you’re using an older version, please check the Google Sitemaps Plugin Homepage for the legacy releases. There is a working release for every WordPress version since 1.5, but you really should consider updating your WordPress installation!

I was having problems with Yoast sitemaps and decided to try this plugin out. The added functionality, control and stability of the plugin is wonderful. I still think Yoast is a great package, but will without doubt switch the Yoast sitemap functionality off and will use Google XML sitemaps going forward.

3.0b4 (2006-11-16)

3.0b2 (2006-01-14)

Fixed several bugs reported by users

3.0b (2005-11-25)

WordPress 2.0 (Beta, RC1) compatible

Added different priority calculation modes and introduced an API to create custom ones (Some people didn’t like the way to calculate the post priority based on the count of user comments. This will give you the possibility to develop custom priority providers which fit your needs.)

Added support to use the Popularity Contest plugin by Alex King to calculate post priority (If you are already using the Popularity Contest plugin, this will be the best way to determine the priority of the posts. Uses to new priority API noted above.)

Added option to exclude password protected posts (This was one of the most requested features.)

Posts and pages marked for publish with a date in the future won’t be included

Added function to start sitemap creation via GET and a secret key (If you are using external software which directly writes into the database without using the WordPress API, you can rebuild the sitemap with a simple HTTP Request. This can be made with a cron job for example.)

Improved compatibility with other plugins (There should no longer be problems with other plugins now which checked for existence of a specified function to determine if you are in the control panel or not.)

Recoded plugin architecture which is now fully OOP (The code is now cleaner and better to understand which makes it easier to modify. This should also avoid namespace problems.)

Improved speed and optimized settings handling (Settings and pages are only loaded if the sitemap generation process starts and not every time a page loads. This saves one MySQL Query on every request.)

Added Button to restore default configuration (Messed up the config? You’ll need just one click to restore all settings.)

Added log file to check everything is running (In the new log window you can see when your sitemap was rebuilt or if there was any error.)

Improved user-interface

Added several links to homepage and support (This includes the Notify List about new releases and the WordPress support forum.)